David D. Friedman, libertarian economist and legal scholar, will speak about his latest book—Legal Systems Very Different from Ours—in which he explains how societies across history have tackled problems of law in unusual ways.

Medieval Icelandic crime victims would sell the right to pursue a perpetrator to the highest bidder. 18th century English justice replaced fines with criminals bribing prosecutors to drop cases. Somali judges compete on the free market; those who give bad verdicts get a reputation that drives away future customers.

From Imperial China to modern Amish, legal systems have faced many problems and dealt with them in different ways. In this talk, David Friedman will discuss several approaches to solving issues such as managing law based on divine revelation or how systems in which law enforcement is private and decentralized work. He will also highlight the features of past legal systems that a modern society might want to borrow.

David D. Friedman is an academic economist with a doctorate in physics. His first book, The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism, was published in 1973 and includes a description of how a society with property rights and without government could function. There as elsewhere, he offers a consequentialist defense of libertarianism.

He is also the author of two novels, one commercially published and one self-published, and, with his wife, a self-published medieval and renaissance cookbook.

We open doors at 6pm and the talk itself will begin at 6.30pm, with a Q&A session taking place after the lecture at approximately 7:15pm.